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12 thoughts on “maybe she was looking for kitty porn.”

It’s a silly way of putting it, but it’s not as impossible as many would think. The internet is a hostile place these days. Someone without a pop-up blocker could easily get deluged with self-opening windows, and there’s some horrifying stuff out there pretty brazenly. Add in malware and viruses, or, shit, if the guy is running windows, even the possibility that his computer was a zombie in a botnet, and who the fuck knows what’s hidden where?

Of course, then there’s the question of why his computer was being looked at by the authorities in the first place.

I don’t know about cats, but I vaguely recall one of my younger brothers being about two keystrokes away from formatting my hard drive…when he was 2. I don’t think it’s impossible. Far-fetched, sure, but not impossible.

I have to speak up for Sumcat. He is a personal friend and I know for a fact that he has no interest in porn. He does bog down my hard drive with pictures of fish and writes smartass comments on bear blogs.

perlhaqr: It’s true that self-opening windows, spyware, etc. can give you porn you didn’t want. But the illegal nature of kiddie porn means that it’s generally restricted to private groups–a few perverts who swap pictures via email or private FTP site or something along those lines. Even on the off chance that he unknowingly had a rootkit installed that hosted kiddie porn, it would probably: a) be deeply hidden in a folder that no normal person would ever notice or access, and b) he would never have looked at it. Given that the investigators will be able to tell when the file was last accessed, I’d imagine that’s not what’s going on here. Is he innocent until proven guilty? Of course. But given that he’s using the cat defense, rather than a more believable “I didn’t know it was on there, the files were never opened, etc.” kind of defense, I’d say it’s more likely that he’s a pedophile.

Srizbi botnet comprises 450,000 comprised machines. Literally millions of machines connected to the internet have some sort of virus or malware on them. Illegal porn and warez trading are known uses of those subnetworks.

I mean, sure, the guy might be a perv. But statistically speaking, I’d place at least even money on there being more child porn on the machines of people who are just lax about internet security, than on the machines of actual pedophiles.

Oh hush with your facts, there are witches to burn, and we already ordered the stakes – next you’ll be asking for someone more competent than J. Random LEO Tech Bod to audit the files and decide whether or not there was complicity! JRLEOTB is From The Government, he’s not going to be wrong, or harrassed and overbusy, or thinking “Burn the fucking paedo scumwad” is he?

More than a thousand images, discovered by police. I suspect they didn’t buy his the cat did it story for good reason. Aside from the absurdity of that, I’m willing to bet that there was a blatant trail of bookmarks and browser history that confirmed the fact that the stuff was deliberately downloaded.
Some of the picture viewers have bookmarks for favorite folders or a list of MRUD’s as well. It would take any police officer with only a cursory knowledge of computers a very short time to look at that stuff, and know what was up. One way or another.

I simply pointed out how easy it would be to find out if the person in question was actively downloading and viewing the material.
How does having a different opinion on the likelyhood of what may be true in this case translate in to breaking out the stakes torches, and pitchforks?
I think it is reasonable to assume they looked at his browser history, and things of that nature. I’m not a LEO, but if I was investigating a child porn case like this, I certainly would start with a thorough investigation of the surfing habits of the person in question.